This deluxe three-volume paperback boxed set?gorgeously designed editions in a see-through case, with a removeable sticker on the shrink wrap packaging?is a collector's item in the making. It beautifully showcases Haruki Murakami's most ambitious novel yet, 1Q84?a love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's.

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84??Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question.? Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

An instant bestseller around the world, 1Q84 is a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

Annotation:Haruki Murakami has published more than a dozen books--mostly novels, but also short story collections, a memoir, and an investigative work of nonfiction. Working since the late 1970s, he has carefully honed his own postmodern fantastical style, drawing on pop culture, classical music, economics, and everything in between. Now, with his novel 1Q84, Murakami pays homage to one of the seminal works of political science fiction. This novel's unusual title looks exactly as it means--it is a reference to 1984, to the way the date gets pronounced in Japanese and to George Orwell's book. A sprawling novel of nearly 1,000 pages, 1Q84 was originally published in three volumes in Japan. The mysterious storyline follows the surreal adventures of an assassin named Aomame ("like green peas," she tells people who don't know how to pronounce it) and a struggling writer named Tengo who has been hired to rework a manuscript that might have originated from a dyslexic teenager.

Author Bio

Haruki Murakami

The son of a literature teacher, Murakami learned English in school and grew up with American fiction. His first novel was published in 1970. He graduated from Waseda University in 1973, with a degree in drama, after which he managed a jazz and coffee shop. With the publication of his novel NORWEGIAN WOOD, Murakami became a cult phenomenon in Japan. He has lived all over the world, including Rome, Athens, and a Greek island, as well as spending four years at Princeton as a visiting fellow, where he wrote THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE. Murakami's books are set in Japan, but they are infused with the urban, eclectic, Western culture he has absorbed all his life.